A new addition to the long bar category

If you’re a fan of long bars, the one at the new Blu Stone Bistro in Colonie will be right up your alley.

On Friday, January 2, the former Calaway Grill at the former Wingate Inn opposite The Desmond will reopen as the Blu Stone Bistro in the hotel that recently was renamed the Hotel Indigo Albany-Latham, sporting, among other things, a 40-foot-long bar of modern design (seen above).

Got all that?

Owners Joe Scaring and Kenny Raymond cooked up the changeover, promising Mediterranean cuisine served in two dining rooms. The bar itself will have a separate food and cocktail menu.

The newcomer will join a list of other long bars at Capital Region establishments. By “long bars,” I’m referring to straight-line or wavy structures rather than multi-sided. A few examples:

• The spectacular African mahogany bar that stretches nearly 50 feet through the center of Smith’s restaurant in Cohoes. Its provenance is traced back to the infamous 19th Century Tammany Hall political headquarters in New York City and has been in Smith’s since the 1930s. It was brought there by old-time political power broker Mike Smith from its original site.

• On Troy’s River Street near the Green Island Bridge, Ryan’s Wake was designed around a gem of a 26-foot Cuban mahogany bar that owner Chris Ryan bought at auction from the estate of the late Col. B.A. Gill, an Albany collector of historiana. Its provenance begins in Amsterdam and dates to the late 1890s. It had been in steady use for decades, then went into storage for 30 years before Ryan acquired it.

I haven’t put them to the tape measure yet, but bars at such places as the new Hollywood Brown Derby opposite Albany’s Palace Theatre, the 205 on Wolf martini bar (nicely wavy) in the Holiday Inn-Turf in Colonie and Daisy Baker’s In Troy all qualify as legit long bars.